Monitoring the Future, an annual survey of 12,500 high
school seniors by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, is
one of America’s most widely quoted surveys on youth behavior. Its release
every December provokes a media and official frenzy over student drug use.
Curiously, one of the survey’s most interesting findings relevant to one of
this era’s biggest fears is never quoted: its findings regarding school
violence trends.

Despite their
worshipful citation in press and official forums, self-reporting surveys are
weak, highly suspect research tools. However, Monitoring is the only long-term consistently-administered survey
of school violence available, and its trends follow the crime cycles in larger
society. Its finding that both white and black students report less
weapons-related victimization in school today than in the 1970s is consistent
with other self-reported violence (students also report fewer instances of
being deliberately injured by persons without weapons, being threatened with
weapons, or being threatened with any kind of violence at school). The stable,
generally declining pattern of violence among white students and the higher,
cyclical pattern among black students is consistent with FBI crime reports.

In 2002, 4% of
high school seniors report being injured by someone with a weapon at school, on
the way to or from school, or at a school event sometime in the year—down from 5-6%
in the 1970s and 1980s and one of the lowest percentage in the survey’s 24-year
history. If that makes schools seem pretty dangerous, reflect on these even
more unsettling perspectives: school safety and crime reports show only
one–sixth of 1% of the nation’s murders occur in schools, and hospital
emergency department records analyzed by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
found homes, workplaces, and streets account for eight, five, and 2.5 times
more violence-related injuries, respectively, than do schools.

School and
police agencies report the rate of injury with weapons in senior high schools
is 46 per 100,000 students, and while they don’t learn about most assaults,
serious injuries would not escape notice. American schools are the site of a
good deal of violence, but apparently not as much as other institutions, led by
the family. Thus, statements that students are safer from murder and serious
injury at school than at home, in the streets, or at work are factual but not
necessarily comforting. The only comforting aspect is that most school violence
is apparently low-level.

The Monitoring findings also directly
contradict anecdotal quotes in the press from school personnel, experts, and
teen-book authors that today’s students are far more violent than those of past
generations. These anecdotal quotes also appear at odds with what most teachers
report. A 1997 Los Angeles Times survey
of 545 students, 1,100 teachers, and 2,600 parents and other adults that found
that 91% of students and 92% of teachers in Los Angeles (supposedly America’s
arch-drug/gang/gunplay capital) rated their schools as “safe.” Only 14% of
students had ever been in a fight at school, and only 1% had been in a fight
involving a weapon.

However, adults
not involved with public schools as teachers or parents—that is, ones whose
impressions derive from media images and quotable authorities—were six to 10 times more likely to rate schools
as imperiled by gangs, violence, and drugs than were the teachers and
students inhabiting those schools. Times editors
(the same ones who editorially lament lack of public support for school
funding) apparently thought the public was insufficiently terrified of public
schools, as its stepped-up alarmism over “school violence” described in Chapter
1 indicates.

That there is
some violence in public schools—led by the school shootings of 1997-2001 that
received gargantuan media attention—properly draws concern, outrage, even (in
cases such as the Columbine High School slaughter) horror. But there is no
excuse for Americans being surprised that
schools are not violence-free. The lack of perspective was pointed out by
Justice Policy Institute president Vincent Schiraldi in a November 22, 1999,
commentary in the Los Angeles Times:

Nowadays, it is impossible to talk about juvenile crime and
not discuss school shootings. Yet school shootings are extremely rare and not
on the increase. In a population of about 50 million schoolchildren, there were
approximately 55 school-associated violent deaths in the 1992–93 school year
and fewer than half that in the 1998–99 school year. By comparison, in 1997, 88
people were killed by lightening—what might be considered the gold standard for
idiosyncratic events. Children who are killed in the United States are almost never
killed inside a school. Yes, 12 kids were killed at Columbine. But by
comparison, every two days in the U.S., 11 children die at the hands of their
parents or guardians.

Gunning
for Students

The term “youth
violence,” a media and official staple, is inherently prejudicial. To
understand this, consider how we treat other demographic groups. Example: About
one million Orthodox Jews live in the United States. Crime statistics aren’t
kept by creed, but assume a half–dozen commit murder every year.

This would give Orthodox Jews one of the
lowest homicide rates of any group—probably the case. That means that every two
months, on average, an Orthodox Jew is arrested for murder. Let’s further
assume that powerful political demagogues want to depict Jews as the font of
violence, and the major media and institutions, as always, go along. Every
couple of months, then, the press erupts, headlining “another Jew violence”
tragedy, with sensational pictures andoverwrought speculation as to “why Jews are so violent.” The press and
politicians resolutely ignore thousands of intervening murders by non-Jews,
including murders of Jews by Gentiles, while connecting every Jewish homicide,
no matter how occasional, into a “spate of Jew killings.” Conservatives angrily
demand tougher policing of Jews. Liberals blame violent Jewish cultural
messages. Politicians and private institutions form a National Campaign to
Prevent Jew Violence.

We need not add
the seig-heils to realize that
equating Jews and violence isn’t an expression of science or genuine concern,
but rank anti-Semitism. Linking an entire population class with a negative
behavior practiced by only a few of its members is bigotry, regardless of which
group is singled out. The politician-media-institution campaign on “youth
violence” is bigoted and devoid of genuine concern for youths. Real concern
would involve lamenting the major causes of violence against youths, yet
politicians and institutions deploring “school violence” and pushing the
National Campaign to Prevent Youth Violence concern themselves only with the
tiny fraction of murdered children and youth that is politically advantageous
to highlight while downplaying larger dangers to the young.

The target of
aging America’s rage is all youths, not just the 13 kids who committed the
recently publicized shootings taking 31 lives in 12 schools in four years (in
Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Edinboro,
Pennsylvania; Springfield, Oregon; Littleton, Colorado; Conyers, Georgia; Fort Gibson,
Oklahoma; Mount Morris, Michigan; West Palm Beach, Florida; Santee,
California). These aren’t all the school shooters; only the young ones with
white victims we choose to care about. Compare: 25 million teenagers, 18
million of them white, attend 20,000 American secondary schools every day.
Another 25 million pre-teens attend elementary schools.

“Columbine” (it
seems a grievous injustice on top of tragedy to equate a school’s name with
mass murder) revealed the individual pathologies of two high school boys;
“post-Columbine” revealed the mass pathology of America’s institutions. Three
years later, I still can’t pick up a copy of Youth Today without seeing program ads blaring, “The Lessons of
Columbine,” crack a newspaper without seeing some Ph.D. declaiming “the new
face of youth violence,” glance at a magazine rack or turn a TV knob without
confronting, “the secret life of suburban teens.” The only blessing is that Rolling Stone fear-monger Randall
Sullivan hasn’t (yet) unburdened another of his fact-free histrionics anointing
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold the new Everyteens.

The lesson of
reporting on Columbine is pretty simple: America sports an ugly new face of
adult hostility, and it doesn’t care about kids. It’s the “quality,” not the
quantity, of school violence victims that sets off panic, with the paradoxical
result that school murders actually are underreported. The late-1990s tactic by
the media and officials to focus on demonizing suburban and small-town youth as
the fright-provoking face of American savagery means that murders of poorer
students and murders by adults in schools are systematically ignored. In a
bizarre twist that reveals reams about official America’s true concern for
young people, whether kids are more likely to get hurt or killed in schools
today than in the past, or more in danger in schools than elsewhere in society,
is of little importance. The alarmism surrounds the supposedly new development
that victims now are white—and thus politically useful.

The National
School Safety Center’s excellent tabulation of “School Associated Violent
Deaths” (http://www.nssc1.org), covering the period from August 1992 through November
2003 (the latest as of this writing), reveals how the press and politicians
have relentlessly manipulated school violence. In truth, there were 39
additional school murders during 1999-2001 which
received practically no publicity, resulting from 35 incidents involving 37
killers in cities from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Pomona, California. What made
these 35 school murders worthy of silence? They fell into two categories.
Thirty involved student victims who were black, Hispanic, Asian, or of unknown
race (the eight whose races were not reported attended mostly-minority
schools), killed by other students or by adults. Nine involved white victims:
six were adults murdered by adults, two were students murdered by adults, and
one student died from a previously undiscovered aneurysm after a fistfight. And
if the NSSC’s tabulation included preschools, the deliberate mowdown of two
toddlers by an enraged middle-aged driver in Costa Mesa, California, would add
to the school murder toll the media ignored.

In the
super-charged 1999 school year when the media feverishly awaited any new school
shooting, three were shrugged off. An Elgin, Illinois, 14-year-old was shot to
death in his classroom in February. Not news: he was Latino and in special ed.
On June 8, two girls were gunned down in front of their high school in Lynwood,
California, south of Los Angeles. Not news (even to the Los Angeles Times, which ran a modest 440-word story on an inside
page): they were Latinas. On November 19, a 13-year-old boy shot a 13-year-old
girl to death in a Deming, New Mexico, middle school. Also Latinos, not the
news editors’ kind and therefore not news.

Similarly, the
Santana High School shooting in Santee, California, on March 5, 2001, involving
a white 15 year-old shooting to death two other white students alleged to have
bullied him, received massive press attention. Reporters absurdly depicted
Santee, site of considerable racial and domestic violence, as a pristine suburb
menaced only by drug-taking teens. The school superintendent suspended friends
of the student shooter, who were also badgered by the press for not reporting
their vague suspicions; popular students suspected of bullying unpopular kids
were not similarly taken to task. In addition, gun murders of two black and one
Latino student in the two months surrounding Santee’s killings were ignored. And,
in a major irony that escaped much attention, a law enforcement officer
training to respond to school shootings at a Texas high school accidentally
shot a fellow officer to death on June 7, indicating that gunners who create
danger at school are not all students.

In fact, several
of the unheralded school murders (the multiple killings of white adults in
Hoboken and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in lover-triangle shootings, or of Latino
students in Pomona and in Lynwood) had death tolls equaling or exceeding nationally
headlined killings (Pearl and Springfield involved two killings, Edinboro and
West Palm Beach one, Conyers and Fort Gibson none). Why, then, did the media,
politicians, and quotable experts deem white- suburban-student murders an
apocalypse and white-adult, minority-student, and inner-city killings of no
importance?

To ask the
question is to answer it: in the crass logic of reporters and editors, things
like that are “supposed to happen” to darker skinned youth. The press’s new
mission was to demonstrate that school shootings proved white, suburban youth
were out of control. If reporters had to ignore school killings that didn’t
confirm their narrow agenda, ignore them they did.

Lost
Scholars

In his December
20, 1999, Time magazine commentary on
the Columbine massacre, Cornell University human development professor and Lost Boys author James Garbarino makes a
startling point. Ninety percent of teenage killers he’s familiar with “conform
to a pattern in which the line from bad parenting and bad environments to
murder is usually clear…abuse, neglect and emotional deprivation at
home…racism, poverty, the drug and gang cultures.”

But the issue is
not quantity, but quality. Time and
the country wanted to fixate on the 10% who, at least within the limits of
psychologists’ understanding (severe limits indeed, one might argue),
constitute the youthful murderers Garbarino claims “have loving parents and are
not poor”—that is, who display neither of the two basic prerequisites for
mayhem. These are the “KIDS Without a Conscience” gracing the cover of People. The media and politicians dote
on privileged savages who validate the 1990s morality fable that unpopular
national sacrifices to promote social equality aren’t necessary. They’re rich,
they kill anyway! Who needs economic justice?

In December
1999, the Columbine shooters’ grim video was leaked by cops and gobbled by the
press for maximum sensation. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris casually anticipated
and knocked down every notion authorities advanced over the previous eight
months to explain “why why why.” Their video (like Christian Slater’s teen
psychopath in the 1989 movie Heathers)
revealed astonishing sophistication at manipulating adult prejudices—a point
not lost on rueful reporters sensationalizing it as the killers arrogantly
promised they would.

There’s
something for everyone. Refuting liberals who claim teenagers are impulsive
children incapable of rational thought or anticipation of consequences, Klebold
and Harris meticulously and patiently planned their massacre for a year,
acutely predicting the results. Contradicting conservatives who claim such
fanatics would shrink from their crimes if we get tough, try them as adults,
and lock them up for eons or put them to death, the Colorado gunboys laugh in
their faces on film before putting guns in their mouths after the massacre.

For those who
claim video games made ‘em do it, a theory all the rage now and coming into
vogue when Klebold and Harris made their video, the latter says to the camera:
“It’s going to be like fucking Doom. Tick tick tick tick…Ha! That fucking
shotgun is straight out of Doom.” That one is quoted a lot. No one in today’s
“personal responsibility” climate seems inclined to blame family abuses, but
just in case, Klebold throws a sop: “You made me what I am,” he railed at his
extended family. “You added to the rage.” Don’t look for that one to be quoted.

The cruelty of
high school socialites? “You’ve been giving us shit for years,” Klebold said to
the “stuckup” kids at his school. But the massacre didn’t target only stuck-up
kids, but whoever was in range. Their rampage was very much like the random,
mass killings by middle-aged men recounted below. So what’s to be done? More
surveillance, counseling, and intrusive psychological interventions? Littleton
was one of three cities nationwide with a state-of-the-art juvenile mental
health assessment center, and both gunners had been through the system; one had
been psychiatrically medicated. Officers and video cameras monitoring hallways?
They had those in Conyers, where a 15-year-old opened fire. More religion in
schools, as House Republicans declared would do the trick? West Paducah’s was a
religious school, and the shooters in Conyers and Fort Gibson were active
churchgoers—one was a Boy Scout, the other sang in the choir.

The problem with
deriving any “lessons” from Littleton is that the rare psychopath, by
definition, does things for reasons the mass of non-psychopaths never consider.
Nevertheless, books, documentaries, and “youth violence” treatises for years to
come will feature highly credentialed authors selectively choosing whatever
over-generalized “explanation” for the “why why why” suits their preconceived
ideologies. I suggest we should pay more attention to Harris’s quiet video aside:
“I can make you believe anything.” For this is all we really know about Klebold
and Harris: along with Kip (Springfield) Kinkel, Michael (West Paducah)
Carneal, and the handful of other school shooters, their kind is vanishingly
rare among teenagers. Here is the irrefutable fact the school gunners proved:
any youth can obtain hefty firepower within scant hours or days of wanting it,
so if even one in 100,000 high schoolers harbored their murderous mentality,
we’d have several Columbines and Jonesboros every week, not two or three a
year. The most accurate conclusion is also the least satisfying to those bent
on divining larger cultural “messages” from Columbine: Klebold and Harris
represented Klebold and Harris, not a generation, not even alienated boys.

Now, what is
preventing Rolling Stone’s Randall
Sullivan and other “experts” from pronouncing such an inescapable conclusion
based on the evidence—the job of an expert, after all? In all the mass media
freakout, I saw only one bit of sanity: CDC violence prevention epidemiologist
Jim Mercy, who told New York Times reporter
Sheryl Stolberg that school shootings are “the statistical equivalent of a
needle in a haystack. The reality is that schools are very safe environments
for kids.”

Middle-Aged
Predators

Wait a minute,
some might argue, when adults kill en masse, they get lots of bad press, too.
Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was deplored by the president and media
for months. Stockbroker Mark Barton, who gunned down 13 and wounded 25 at an
Atlanta brokerage firm in August 1999, got on the covers of national magazines.

Are youthful
killers being treated unfairly, then? No—youthful killers are not being mistreated, except in the sense that their
evil deeds are more likely to be featured in the press and deplored by
luminaries than similar murders by adults. (Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, and Kip
Kinkel remain far bigger names than Mark Barton, Buford Furrow, and Larry Gene
Ashbrook, middle-agers who committed similar, more recent public massacres.)
The unfairness involves the fact that middle-aged killers are treated by the
press and experts as crazed individuals committing isolated acts while youthful
killers are treated as part of a connected pattern demonstrating today’s
younger generation is uniquely barbaric. Consider recent murders in Ventura
County, California, among the nation’s richest suburban havens. Its three
cities of over 100,000 people are regularly cited as among the safest in the
United States from violent crime. Yet in the last 36 months, three affluent,
suburban Ventura grownups in their 40s blew away 10 people in multiple-victim
rage shootings—six children and four adults. That’s more than the combined toll
of headlined shootings by high schoolers in Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah,
Kentucky; and Jonesboro, Arkansas—all in just one county.

Horror? The
Ventura grownup shootings had that: 44-year-old man guns down screaming wife
and three children on pastoral lane, 43-year-old man rakes two neighbors with
bullets as one’s three-year-old shrieks in terror; 42-year-old mom blasts three
boys in their beds in ritzy rural enclave. All the usual big story ingredients
were there: well-off perpetrators coldly mowing down innocent children in
communities where “murder just doesn’t happen,” carnages so bloody law
enforcement veterans required counseling, etc. Yet none made national
headlines. No CNN continuous coverage, no Ph.D.s shaking heads at society’s
degeneration, no tearful presidential condolences. The only ingredient missing:
the murderers were not youths.

The
“post-Columbine” events proved the school shootings were not a youth, but a
“dissed suburban male” phenomenon. The crucial point being missed is that
Klebold, Harris, Kinkel, and other middleclass student gunmen had practically
nothing in common with other kids (their
isolation, in fact, was a big part of their rage), but they had a lot in common
with adult middle-class mass killers.
Consider the quick succession of grownup massacres in 1999, of which the
following is but a partial list:

·March 18—71-year-old Walter
Shell kills his attorney and a client in Johnson City, Tennessee. Shell blamed
the lawyer for losses in litigating his wife’s will.

·April 15—five days before
Columbine, Sergei Barbarin, also 71, sprays the Mormon Family History Library
in Salt Lake City with gunfire, killing two and wounding four before police
killed him. This inexplicable slaughter followed similar gunplay by a
24-year-old man in downtown Salt Lake City on January 14 that killed one and
wounded another.

·July 12—Cyrano Marks, 40,
described as “a gentle giant who never hurt anyone,” guns down six members of a
suburban Atlanta, Georgia, family, then himself. The dead included kids ages 9,
13, 15, and 16, and three adults. An 11-year-old escaped death by hiding in a
closet. The motive: apparent jealousy over the live-in mother’s rejection.

·July 29—Mark Barton, 44,
murders his wife and two little girls, then kills nine and wounds 13 at two
Atlanta brokerage firms where he worked as a day trader, then shoots himself to
death. The 13 dead and 25 total casualties rival Columbine. Motives: apparently
financial failure, impending divorce. Story wins brief front-page and magazine
cover attention, then fades.

·August 10—White supremacist
Buford Furrow Jr., 37, fatally shoots a Filipino postal worker after wounding
five children in gunfire at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los
Angeles.

·September 15—Larry Gene
Ashbrook, 47, Fort Worth, shoots four teenagers and three adults to death and
wounds seven more at the Wedgewood Baptist Church during a Christian music
concert, then kills himself. Police found bomb-making tools in Ashbrook’s home.
Ashbrook had written letters blaming bosses for his job losses and inability to
get along with co-workers.

·November 1—Bryan Uyesugi, 40,
shoots seven fellow employees to death at the Xerox office in Honolulu. It was
Hawaii’s worst mass murder. Police found 17 firearms, including 11 handguns,
five rifles, and two shotguns at Uyesugi’s house despite the fact he had been
denied a firearms permit after an arrest for criminal damage at his office.

·November 3—Kevin Cruz, 30, a
shipyard worker “with a history of run-ins with the law,” kills two and wounds
two more, in a Seattle shooting spree.

·November 22—Cora Caro, 42, a
suburban Ventura, California, physician’s wife described as “a doting mother
and an active churchgoer,” shoots three sons, ages 5, 8, and 11, to death and
wounded herself in what police call a staged suicide attempt in their “gated
mansion on eight acres in a valley of millionaires.”

·December 30—Silvio Leyva, 36,
guns down five and injures three at the ritzy Radisson Hotel in Tampa. Hotel
co-workers speculate he “just snapped.”

To see how
closely the motives and behaviors of the youthful school shooters resemble
those of the adults who committed gun massacres, consider only the dozen most
recent shootings in the last half of 1999. All involved gunners in their 30s
and 40s, all of middle-class or wealthier status, 11 of them men. The toll was
90 casualties: 59 dead (including 21 children and teenagers) and 31 wounded (10
of them kids). Thus, just 25 weeks of middle-aged gunnings (in my informal,
incomplete tabulation that includes only mass shootings) killed and injured far
more people than three years of school shootings. Each event occurred where
“such things are not supposed to happen”: professional offices, churches, Bible
study groups, community centers, ritzy hotels, suburban homes, posh enclaves. A
few received press attention, but the media quickly wearied of the sheer number
of killings carried out by the middle-aged.

Even if we
examine only the public “rage killings” by white adult men that most resemble
the school shootings, the toll in the seven incidents above was 35 dead, 34
wounded. Clearly, massacres are not a “youth” phenomenon. The middle-aged
mass-killer motives were strangely akin to those of the schoolboy shooters from
Pearl to Columbine. The gunners felt rejected by employers, co-workers, wives,
girlfriends, saw themselves as failures, harbored racism, accumulated massive
gun and bomb arsenals.

Individuals,
Not Harbingers

“They’re not
drunk or high on drugs. They’re not racists or Satanists or addicted to violent
video games, movies, or music,” began an April 9-10, 2000, New York Times series on school shooters and other “rampage
killers,” entitled, “They threaten, seethe, and unhinge, then kill in
quantity.” Reporters led by Ford Fessenden catalogued hundreds of rampage
killings in the U.S. since 1950. They profiled 102 teenage and adult rampage
murderers whose 100 multiple, public killings left 425 dead and 510 injured. As
is nearly always the case when an issue is studied rather than butchered by
experts’ and pundits’ anecdotal pontifications, the Times analysis uncovered major challenges to popular myths.
Politicians’ and programs’ favorite culprits turned out to be trivial. Very few
of the rampagers patronized violent media; practically none harbored occult or
satanic interests. “Cultural influences seemed small,” the Times concluded.

However, there
was “an extremely high association between violence and mental illness.” Half
had been formally diagnosed with serious maladies, led by schizophrenia and
depression. When it came to ignoring warning signs of catastrophe,
psychiatrists, family members, and peers were equally blind. Rampage killers
overwhelmingly were male (96 of 102) and white (79). They tended to be older
(high proportion in 30s and 40s) than single-victim murderers. A large majority
were suburban, small-town, or rural.

Their mass
killings were not new-not even school massacres. Two examples in the Times sample: in 1974, Olean, New York,
honor student Anthony Barbaro, 17, opened fire at his school, killing three and
wounding nine. In 1979, Brenda Spencer, 16, gunned two to death and injured
nine at a San Diego elementary school. (Those two mass killings by white
students in the 1970s merited only inside stories in Time and Newsweek, which
is why experts don’t remember them). But rampage killers of all ages, though
rare, appear somewhat more plentiful today—23 per year in the 1970s and 1980s,
34 per year in the 1990s.

As noted, the
FBI reports that youths under age 18 accounted for about 6% of the 50,000
murders in the U.S. in the last four years. The famous school shootings
comprised one-twentieth of 1% of the murders in the United States, and half of
these were at Littleton. By contrast, in a few months, over-30 men slaughtered
three times more in multiple-victim shootings than all school students in four
years. This raises a blunt question: do the authorities, from President Clinton
to institutional and media commentators, view Cyrano Marks as a symbol of
general murderousness among black men? Andrew Cunahan as a harbinger of gay
male rage? Mark Barton as symbolic of suburban businessman savagery? Cora Caro
as the image of the new killer soccer-mom? None I’m aware of has so labeled. In
fact, most would consider those who define racial or other groups by their most
brutal individuals as bigots of a particularly ugly and hostile
mindset—especially if followed with proposals to inflict mass controls on the
disfavored groups. It is exactly this kind of prejudicial thinking that
grownups lecture teenagers to avoid.

Certainly there
is no National Campaign to Prevent Middle-Aged Violence (which is a far more
prevalent problem, statistically than “youth violence”). But if adults would
not elevate our most murderous few as symbols of the moral disintegration of
the groups we occupy, by what right do we hold up Klebold, Harris, or Kinkel as
symbols of suburban youth, or of all youth?

A
Murdered Child We Cared About

Then came
February 29, 2000, and the next astounding demonstration of how willfully the American
political-media complex just doesn’t get it. A six-year-old boy brought a gun
to his elementary school in Mount Morris Township, Michigan, and shot classmate
Kayla Rolland, also six, to death. Immediately, the national press charged in,
as it had 19 months earlier in August 1998, when two Chicago seven-year-olds
were arrested and accused of beating Ryan Harris, 11, to death, allegedly to
steal her bicycle. Front pages then blared the enormity of the two boys’ crime
and speculated on its effects on get tough juvenile justice legislation. Then,
persuasive new evidence indicated police had framed the boys and that the real
murderer was a 29-year-old rapist. Result: officials and reporters abruptly
lost interest in Ryan’s killing, graphically demonstrating how little the press
and politicians cared about a bludgeoned sixth grader once the killer turned
out to display the wrong demography.

The Mount Morris
first-grade shooter was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother to live with
relatives in a crack house in a community four–fifths of whose children lived
in poverty. However, it quickly became clear that the media, politicians, and
interest groups were zeroing in on the easy villains—”how a six-year-old got
his hands on a gun,” and media violence. The first was easy. There are 240
million guns loose in the U.S. Repeated studies have shown that even after
years of intensive publicity on “kids and guns,” millions of American gun
owners do not store guns safely. A March 2000 University of California study found
43% of the gun owners who have children under age 18 in their homes admitted leaving firearms in unlocked
places; 14% of gun owners with kids said their unlocked guns were loaded; and we can assume even more
parents who left guns lying around would also have unsecured ammunition handy.
Even parents and other adults who had taken gun safety courses did not store
guns safely. There must be millions of loaded firearms, and tens of millions of
unloaded firearms with accessible ammunition, handy where kids can get to them.
After all, most school shooters acquired guns with ease from parents,
relatives, or other “legitimate” sources.

To rephrase:
“How could a six-year-old NOT get his hands on a gun?” Given the quantity of
guns easily available to kids, why don’t tragedies like Mount Morris’s happen
every day? An even better question: what does the failure of most American gun
owners to store guns properly say about the maturity of adults who possess
lethal weapons? President Clinton lamented in March 2000 that “every day, 13
children die from guns in this country.” (Actually, in the latest year
tabulated, 1998, the number was 10; Clinton’s “children” included 18- and
19-year-olds the president did not so label when he armed and sent them to his
many wars.) And if we’re concerned about kids, where is the lament of the
president and big lobbies that adults age 20 and older shoot 75 people to death
every day, including most child murder victims?

The
Switzerland Example

An
intermittently thoughtful piece in the February 1990 American Rifleman detailed how the Swiss experience calls the easy
superficialities of both gun-control and gun-rights dogmatists into question.
With virtually universal household firearms possession, fascination with gun
shows and target shooting, and laws that allow private citizens to acquire the
most sophisticated automatic pistols, assault weaponry, and even howitzers
(rocket launchers!), Swiss “gun culture” makes the United States’ look modest.
Yet Switzerland reports about five fatal gun accidents, 60 total homicides (gun
murders are too rare to tabulate), and gun involvement only in one-fifth of
suicides (compared to three-fifths in the U.S.), making it one of the safest
countries in the world.

But there are
crucial nuances. While gun-rights advocates claim the safe Swiss gun culture
demolishes the arguments of gun-control advocates, it in fact demolishes both
sides—or affirms both sides, if you prefer. The Swiss are issued guns by the
military as part of universal service for men, the guns are registered and
subject to inspection, and extensive training and retraining is required. True,
guns don’t kill people, people do; but even more true, Americans with guns kill
far more people than people in nations which prohibit firearms ownership or which
allow it only under strict controls.

Interestingly,
researchers on Swiss gun culture conclude America still needs strict gun
controls. The American Rifleman author
cautions gun owners not to casually dismiss researchers’ argument that, “while the
Swiss may be responsible enough to own even the deadliest guns, Americans are
not.” Massachusetts is the U.S. state with the strictest gun controls,
requiring gun registration and licensing and a host of other restrictions, and
it also has the nation’s lowest gun death rate. By coincidence, Massachusetts
has about the same population and per-capita income as Switzerland. In the
mid–1990s, Massachusetts suffered about 150 gun suicides, 100 gun homicides,
and four or five gun accidents per year. Thus, Massachusetts’ rate of gun
accidents and suicides is somewhat lower, but its rate of gun homicide is five
times higher, than Switzerland’s. Overall, Switzerland, awash in firearms, has
the same gun death rate as America’s safest, most gun-controlled state; if one
eliminates suicide and considers only violence inflicted on others,
Massachusetts’ citizens are several times deadlier with guns than the Swiss.
Other American states have even higher gun tolls than Massachusetts. This would
indicate that even with strict gun controls, Americans would remain more prone
to homicide than the Swiss.

The experience
of the more disciplined Swiss society cannot be casually transferred to the
U.S. Only a small fraction of American adults (most certainly not including me)
are mature enough to shoulder the day-to-day responsibility of owning a
firearm, storing it carefully, and being rigorously trained in its use.
Further, the tacit acceptance (how else can their silence be interpreted?) by
American leaders, the media, gun sellers, society in general, and even
gun-control lobbies of the endless series of adult-perpetrated gun carnages
that kill many times more people (including children) than kids do delineates a
society in which “legitimate adult gun ownership” is a contradiction in terms.
This problem is further emphasized by the fanatic resistance to even modest gun
storage and safety regulations. Obsession with reforming or “protecting” youths
has become the way not to talk about
larger issues. If Americans want the greater social cohesiveness of countries
which safely manage dangerous items such as firearms, investment in Swiss and
European style universal social insurance programs that prevent extreme poverty
(and which prevent poverty among the U.S. elderly) is a major step. The
prevalence of adult gun killings should be deplored by gun control groups with
the same angry fervor applied to those by children and teenagers. Instead of
indulging superficialities, America’s gun debate needs to initiate discussion
of the tough measures of peer societies.

Drawing
Chalklines

As the press
reverberated with the Mount Morris first-grade shooting, Ronald Taylor, 39,
killed three and wounded two the next day in a gun rampage at his apartment
building and two fast-food restaurants in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburb
of Wilkinsburg. As in the Michigan first grade killing, the shooter was black,
the victims white, the neighborhood shabby. The middle-ager, who had no prior
criminal record, had argued with maintenance workers at his apartment and also
made anti-white and anti-Jewish remarks. “He must have what I call the American
flu,” said Taylor’s neighbor Eric Nesbit, one of the year’s few sensible
remarks on mass shootings.

On March 4,
2000, five days after the Michigan six-year-old’s shooting, another angry white
30-ager, Tommy Lynn Sells, confessed to 13 murders in seven states. Texas state
police, believing his confessions due to his detailed knowledge of unreported
crime scene details, called Sells a “killing machine” who “gave no explanation”
for his savageries. The 35-year-old had been jailed on charges of murder and
attempted murder for slashing the throats of two Del Rio, Texas, girls, ages 10
and 13. The older girl died, but the younger, Krystal Surles, badly wounded,
staggered to a neighbor’s house and described her assailant closely enough to
lead to his capture three days later. The vast majority of Americans never
heard of how Krystal’s determination saved countless lives. Child victims who
serve no powerful interest group’s agenda are treated as trivial.

Then on March 7,
8, and 19, 2000, came more over–30 rifle slaughter. A Memphis fireman, Fred
Williams, 41, apparently anguished over a girlfriend’s rejection, murdered her
and ambushed co-workers responding to a fire he set to cover the killing; four
died. In Baltimore, Joseph Palczynski, 31, also conjugally distressed, shot
four to death and wounded two (including a two-year-old) on March 7 and, 10
days later, took three hostages (including former girlfriend and 12-year-old son)
before being killed by police.

The national
media reported these stories for a day or two, but these were not the kind of
rage killings reporters wanted. In contrast, the first anniversary of the
Columbine High shooting was coming up on April 20, 2000, and the press rang
with fears of an encore. Curt Lavallo, executive director of the burgeoning
National Association of School Resource Officers (a school police service whose
numbers doubled to 5,500 in the past year even as school violence levels declined)
waxed inflammatory: “The date has them worried about a lot of copycats or kids
who may try to send a very, very strong message. It’s been absolutely clear in
the tragedies we’ve seen on school campuses that these incidents can occur at
any time, in any school.” Lavallo, like the prison lobby, represents a
disturbing, growing force in American society, one that profits from high rates
of crime and violence and continuously scaring the public therewith.

Open fire,
disgruntled white kid, the national media and authorities all but shouted, and
we’ll make sure eternal fame is yours. What happened? Nothing. Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Mother Jones fearmongers please note:
the fact that none of the tens of
millions of students, even the supposed legions of alienated hair-trigger boys,
blasted up a school to create their own memorial shows that few if any kids
idolized Klebold and Harris. A most newsworthy point that made no news.

Instead, five
more older, well-off white men flipped. Two days before the Columbine
anniversary so feverishly hyped in the press, 56-year-old Kenneth Miller Sr.
toted several guns into the Towers senior citizens’ condo at Lincoln Park,
Michigan, and fired 15 shots from a .22 caliber rifle, killing three women. His
son said Miller, a country music singer with “no history of violence,” was
upset over sexual harassment allegations by several women in the Towers, where
he lived. On April 20, another senior complex was the scene of slaughter when
Richard Glassel, 61, opened fire in a crowd of 50 attending a meeting of the
Ventana Lakes, Arizona, retirement community board, killing two and wounding
three before one of his three loaded guns jammed. Glassel was known as a
“hothead” who redecorated his dwelling with a chainsaw after other homeowners
took legal action against him. Later that day, Robert Lee Yates, a 47-year-old
National Guard helicopter pilot and suburban, married father of five, was
arrested by Seattle police and accused of murdering at least a dozen
prostitutes, including a 16-year-old he was charged with shooting. Then,
Richard Braumhammers, a 34-year-old lawyer, was arrested for shooting five to
death and wounding one, including two Asians, two blacks, and one Jew, in an
apparent hate rampage in suburban McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, on April 27. On
April 29, Michael Rice, 33, of suburban Mt. Clemens, Michigan, apparently
distraught that his wife was leaving him, shot her, two other people, and
himself.

Granddads?
Country musicians? Helicopter pilots? Firemen?
The bedrock of America? Where would it end? Body count for over-30 rage gunners
in just 60 days since the Michigan grade school shooting: 26 dead, nine
wounded, confessions or accusations of 25 past murders and multiple maimings.
The press ran the stories briefly; but it was looking for younger fish to fry.

At this point,
this volume’s far-from-complete catalog of middle-aged gun slaughter will
close. It is mind-numbingly endless, as the reader can attest. For exactly that reason, it is the true face
of American gun violence. Ninety percent of America’s firearms killing is
perpetrated by adults 20 and older, causing 30,000 deaths per year during the
1990s. It is swept aside (President Clinton was still harping on the
six-year-old in his showy public squabble with the National Rifle Association)
because it is too common, too routine, and therefore too unsettling for our
press, our political system, and our institutions—even the youth lobbies—to
confront.

Gunsmoke

However, April 24,
2000, brought a shooting politicians could get interested in—sort of. A
16-year-old Washington, DC, youth shot into a group of kids, wounding seven,
one critically. The accused shooter and victims were black, so this was not the
kind of “kids killing kids” the press or politicians care much about. Had it
taken place in a poorer neighborhood, it would have received only brief press
attention; a child or teen is shot to death every week in Washington, and I
can’t recall the last one that made national news. However, this shooting
occurred at the National Zoo, a major tourist attraction in a posh section of
the city. It was a safe opportunity for politicians who had been silent about
the scores of kids and adults murdered in dozens of mass shootings by graying
grownups to discharge their agendas without venturing into the thorny area of
what to do about “adults and guns.”

Immediately
after the Washington shooting, the press speculated on how this latest “high
profile” juvenile killing would affect juvenile justice and gun legislation.
Politicians unleashed their “kids and guns” one-liners. “We really have to have
mandatory child safety trigger locks, and photo license IDs for the purchase of
new handguns,” said Vice President Al Gore. Said Washington Mayor Anthony
Williams: “We’ve got to get kids and guns separated from one another, they
don’t go together.”

Perfect examples
of American leaders’ dangerous penchant for grandstanding. Who goes together
with guns is a matter of individuality, not age, as the middle-aged rampages
which constitute the typical face of America’s mass gun slaughter show. If
anything should have alerted experts and leaders to the fact that the school
shootings were in no way a “youth,” but a much larger, American phenomenon, the
string of well-off middle-agers blowing away dozens in a matter of weeks in
1999 should have done it. It did not.

With the zeal to
exploit tragedy that helps make the United States such an appallingly high-risk
society, American chieftains and institutions ignored the adult carnage and
pushed ahead with pretensions that “youth gun violence” remained the crisis.
Crusades by the National Campaign to Prevent Youth Violence, Handgun Control,
Inc., and the Children’s Defense Fund to “get guns out of the hands of children”
had but one motive: to mold the gun and violence issues into risk-free ones
amenable to political and institutional goals. The “kids and guns” campaign
reveals how Americans’ focus on blaming and controlling powerless demographic
groups (in this case, children and adolescents) hampers us addressing violence
and other serious issues as effectively as other Western nations that focus on
preventing dangerous behaviors.

In October 1999,
the Children’s Defense Fund’s report, Children
and Guns, and web postings by Handgun Control, Inc., demonstrated that
anti-gun lobbies can be every bit as inflammatory and deceptive in profiteering
from fear of “youth violence” as the National Rifle Association is in
exploiting fear of crime. That America’s high level of gun violence separates
us from every other Western society makes the CDF’s put-politics-first report
all the more inexcusable. The chief question is whether the CDF and other “kids
and guns” lobbies are actively endangering kids, just as the NRA does, with “put
agendas first” politics.

Children and Guns is particularly disturbing because it so
casually omits the crucial contexts of gun violence by youths and instead
employs statistical duplicity to advance schemes its own data show are woefully
ineffective. The report notes that 37,000 “children” under age 20 (again, 18-
and 19-year-olds are designated “children” or “adults,” as convenient) died
from gunfire from 1990 through 1997. This tragedy was compounded by the CDF’s failure to point
out forcefully that youth shootings are inevitable in a nation in which 250,000
adults 20 and older died from guns during the same period—or that American
adults shoot many times more kids than adults shoot in all other Western
nations put together. “Children” and “adults” may be separable in
Washington-lobby theory, but in real life, their fates are tightly intertwined.

My calculations
using the same National Center for Health Statistics data the CDF cites show
the state-by-state correlation between the rate of gun death among children and
among adults for the 1990s is a staggering 0.88 (on a maximum scale of 1.00).
In simple terms, in states where lots of adults kill or die from guns, lots of
kids kill or die from guns; in states where adults are safer, kids are safer.
This near one-to-one correlation indicates that focusing on “kids and guns” is useless; adult gun tragedy and youth gun
tragedy are just two names for the same problem.

The correlation
between adult gun-death rates and youth gun-death rates is one of the highest
I’ve seen in behavior science. It is thousands of times more significant than
the widely touted, but weak correlations between youths’ patronage of violent
media and real-life violence, which typically average around 0.10. It means
that those who are concerned about America’s gun carnage should stop diverting
attention with side issues like media and video game violence, or
politically-safe fantasies that we can allow adults to have guns but somehow
keep them away from teenagers, and get to the real issue: Americans adults
handle guns with monumental carelessness and malintent, and “kids and guns” is
just the junior version of “adults and guns.”

In that regard,
the CDF makes two revolutionary admissions: “children are more likely to be
killed by adults than (by) other children” and “schools are one of the safest
places for our children. Children are far more likely to be killed after
school, in their own homes, or in their friends’ homes than in school.” These
insights should push the debate toward focusing on guns, not the age of the
shooter. But, in spite of this—or perhaps because
they point to revolutionary shakeup—these vital truths are ignored in the
remainder of CDF’s report, as in the gun squabble generally.

The number-one
fact neither side in the gun debate wants to talk about: adults shoot kids. The
FBI’s tabulation of 6,240 homicides in 2001 for which the age of killer and
victim are known repeated the typical pattern: just 113 (2%) involved a
juvenile under age 18 killing another juvenile. However, 610 (10%) involved an
adult killing a juvenile. Thus, five
times more juvenile victims were killed by adults than were killed by other
juveniles. Nor do juveniles reciprocate by killing adults—252 homicides (4%
of the total) involved a person under 18 killing a person 18 or older. The
remaining 5,265 murders (84%) involved adults killing adults.

A more detailed,
two-year tabulation of 1,856 homicides in California in 1997-98 for which the
age of the victim and offender are known, which I obtained from the state’s
Criminal Justice Statistics Center, reveals the following:

Murders BY Juveniles:

· 66 (3.6%) involved a murderer under age 18 killing a
victim under age 18

· 87 (4.7%) involved a murderer aged 25 or older killing a
victim under age 18

· 266 (14.3%) involved a murderer of any age killing a
victim under age 18

The remaining 77% of murders involved
adults killing adults.

Juveniles
accounted for only 9% of these murders in California. A youth was nearly twice
as likely to be killed by an adult age 25 or older (4.7% of the state’s
murders) than the other way around (2.5%). In fact, a youth was more likely to
be murdered by an adult over age 25 than
by another juvenile! And it goes the other way, though in much smaller numbers:
juveniles kill adults. More than half the murders by a killer under age 18
involves a victim over that age.

In March 2000,
the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention refined the figures
even more. Of the 38,000 children and youths murdered from 1980 through 1997,
three–fourths were killed by adults 18 and older. Of the one in four juveniles
killed by another juvenile, one–sixth involved an adult co-offender. Thus, an
adult was involved in 78% of the murders of children and youths, a fact of
vital importance to the “kids and guns” discussion.

However, these
crucial, distressing points were buried in the CDF’s sensational press
statements and poster campaign—the images most people will see. Its posters,
depicting Columbine High’s shooting aftermath and steely-eyed youths aiming
handguns, screamed, “Remember when the only thing kids were afraid of at school
was a pop quiz?” What clichéd cowardice.

Clearly, the CDF
isn’t up to confronting the adult violence FBI and Department of Justice
figures show kills 95% of murdered children and 70% of murdered teens. Four of
the five sidebar anecdotes in the CDF report depict children shooting children.
The report lists the school shootings as “simply the latest wake-up calls for
what has been happening every day in America for a very long time.” It is
troubling that the same child advocates who ringingly deplore “children killing
children,” “youth violence,” and “guns in school” gingerly tiptoe around the
fact that adults murder more kids every three days than student killers do in a
year.

The CDF’s
fear-based press and poster campaign picturing youths as coldly evil gunners
runs the risk of backfiring. Research indicates that both youths and adults who
acquire guns out of fear (rather then for hunting or target shooting) are more
likely to keep loaded guns handy, carry them, and use them. The CDF narrative
feeds this generalized fear by misrepresenting youth gun violence as a common
phenomenon that “knows no boundaries.”

The report
claims that “gun violence is an equal opportunity disaster” because most
victims are white. But this is true only if Latinos are classified as “white.”
In fact, youths of color (including Latinos), 36% of the youth population,
suffer 65% of youthful gun deaths. Further down, the CDF report admits the
firearms death rate for young blacks is five times higher than for young
whites. This is galaxies from “equal opportunity.” Far from “knowing no
boundaries,” just 10% of California’s zip
codes accounted for five-sixths of the gun deaths and 90% of the gun murders
among persons under age 20 in 1997, while four–fifths of California’s zip codes had zero gun deaths among
children and youths. National and California figures (see Table 11) show
two startling facts that merit careful consideration in the homily-happy gun
debate:

White Anglo teenagers are considerably safer from gun fatality than Anglo adults, but Black,
Hispanic, Asian, and Native teenagers are far
more at risk from guns than adults of their races. The gun risk to Anglo teens declined sharply in the last 10 to 15 years
while the danger to youths of color
skyrocketed.

Ignoring these enormous realities, the
CDF’s posters depict only white
youthful gun-brandishers and school violence scenes. Why? If black youths are
many times more victimized by guns, shouldn’t posters show black kids icily
sighting down the barrel? But that approach would draw justifiable outrage that
the CDF was stigmatizing black males as killers (as a Time magazine cover depicting a black man over a violence headline
did) in a society already too eager to believe that. Would that a group called
the “Children’s Defense Fund” been similarly sensitive to not stigmatizing
youths as killers.

As will be
shown, the true villain is not race or age. Both within and between racial and
ethnic groups, poverty is strongly connected to gun demise (the correlation
between child poverty rates and child gun death rates by state is 0.58, also
very high). The CDF, one of the few groups to raise the issue of child poverty
in the 1990s, seems to soft-pedal that issue today. It fails to point out that
reducing poverty is the single biggest step toward reducing gun violence both
by adults and youths.

Instead, all of
the CDF’s “action steps” concern restricting and reforming youth behavior. Most
of the CDF’s recommendations focus on criminalizing acquisition and ownership
of guns by persons under age 21, engaging various educational and control
schemes to keep kids from getting guns, and preserving “legitimate” adult
rights to have guns for “sporting purpose.” The CDF resorts to crude
statistical deceptions to make these unworkable measures appear effective in
saving kids’ lives when, in fact, the evidence shows they’re more likely to
accompany more juvenile gun deaths
(see Chapter 4). Such “kiddy gun control” strategies don’t work because they
are founded in deadly flaws: youthful gun killings closely track those of
grownups around them, and society can’t expect youths who live in situations
where gun dangers are most acute to obey laws that disarm the young but which
allow adults to have the guns to shoot them—especially when that same society
collectively shrugs when adults kill kids.

“Bowling for Columbine”: The Left also Misframes Gun
Quandary

Michael Moore, a Ralph Nader
backer of Stupid White Men fame,
released Bowling for Columbine in
November 2002. The film combines humor, colorful interviews, indignant
arraignments of corporations and right-wing gun nuts, and favorable audience
reception. It also raises troubling question as to why progressive thinking on
gun violence issue remains so confused.

Moore
begins with the right question--why do Americans kill each other with guns at
rates staggeringly higher than any other affluent society? He then invites us
to dissect the issue logically. Popular hokum masquerading as explanation
doesn’t cut it.

Is it America’s
violent history? No. Germany, the UK, Japan, and other Western nations with
minuscule gun-murder rates have bloody histories as well.

Violent games
and movies? No. Other rich nations sop up blood-soaked entertainment.

Alienated kids?
No shortage of those in less homicidal cultures.

Poverty? No, Moore
says, confusing unemployment with poverty. Canadian and UK unemployment rates
are higher than the US’s.

America’s guns?
No. Canadians own plenty of guns and can buy bullets by the truckload.

Racial
diversity? No, Moore says; Canada is also multiethnic.

But Moore’s statistics are
absurdly misleading. The U.S. is far more gun-infested (three times more guns,
and eight times more handguns, per person than Canada), impoverished (poverty
rates two to five times higher than Canada’s, especially for extreme and
concentrated poverty) and diverse (blacks and Hispanics comprise 26% of the
U.S. population compared to 2% of Canada’s, most of whose minorities are more
affluent Asians with low murder rates). Moore’s level of basic factuality
barely tops “Lyin’ King” Rush Limbaugh’s.

What
is this movie trying to say? On one level, complete nonsense. Moore presents
white people’s fear of blacks and Hispanics, and consequent orgy of suburban
gun-buying, as the cause of gun violence. He interviews the Flint, Michigan, District
Attorney, who claims with a straight face that inner-city gun violence is not
the problem; the problem is white suburban teens with guns. Moore lets him get
away with reinforcing this liberal copout that both evades uncomfortable
socioeconomic realities and reveals the extent to which white, upper-class
politicians only get concerned when white people die.

Moore
and the DA forgot to consult Flint area vital statistics, which show 25 times
more black inner-city teens than white suburban teens murdered by gunfire.
Can’t get those in power concerned about that. Moore’s film follows the
standard media rule: Gun killings are only important when they have white
victims. Columbine’s school gun massacre is chosen as the focus not because it
is a common or watershed event (gun massacres are common in America, but white
school shootings are extremely rare), but because its victims were suburban.

Commenting on this
conundrum, Moore contradicts himself again with a bizarrely racist comment.
“Ninety percent of the guns in this country are bought out in the white suburbs
where you don’t need them because there’s virtually no crime,” he told Phil
Donahue (MSBNBC, October 28, 2002).
“And as the prosecutor says in the film, these guns then are stolen from the
white communities and end up back in the inner city, creating all this
violence.” Moore claims the problem is that low-crime white people let guns get
into the hands of violent black people? Imagine the liberal outrage if Rush
Limbaugh said that!

Having told fawning Donahue
the suburbs have “virtually no crime,” Moore reverses himself yet again,
telling fawning Oprah (ABC, 11/8/02) that the result of all the suburban
gun-buying is that “the majority of murders” are “between white people.” Not
even nearly. The latest, 2000 figures from the National Center for Health
Statistics show that of 10,801 gun homicides in the U.S., 2,900 (a little more
than one-fourth) involved whites; seven in 10 involved blacks and Latinos.

While
demanding that conservative gun-rights groups and corporations honestly
soul-search their self-serving illogic, Moore walks away from points that are
difficult for liberals and leftists. Blacks, 12% of the population, suffer 52%
of the nation’s gun homicide deaths--a rate 11 times higher than whites’. Nine
in 10 murdered blacks are shot by other blacks, not by whites.

Moore’s
orgy of self-contradiction concerns a political problem facing liberals in
general: blacks and Hispanics really do commit and suffer gun violence at far
higher levels than do more affluent whites. Further, it is not whites shooting
minorities but, as Tupac Shakur lamented, “It’s my own kind doing all the
killing here.” Poorer whites also have high gun murder rates; one’s odds of
dying by gunfire rise sharply in almost perfect syncopation with one’s poverty
level. Instead of confronting these stark realities, Moore trivializes black
and Hispanic gun violence as figments of white paranoia.

Is
racism justified, then? Are whites right to arm themselves in fear of poorer
gun-toters? No, as Moore’s walking tour of south-central Los Angeles to counter
media fear-mongering about black killers symbolically demonstrates. Of course
L.A., even its most supposedly dangerous neighborhoods, is safer for whites
than they believe. Nearly all of the relatively small number of murdered whites
(85 murder victims in 2,002, in L.A.’s white population of 3 million) were
slain by their own relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances.

Meanwhile,
LA’s scourge of black gun homicide (357 murder victims in a population of
900,000) is 14 times that of whites, and 100 times higher in South-central than
among LA’s suburban whites. Moore not only fails to mention this awful fact,
but--in a film supposedly concerned with gun violence--he jokes about police
responding to a gun incident that occurs right on the street where he is
filming. Still, American whites, hardly poor as a group, suffer gun murder
levels 2.5 times higher than Canadian citizens. What is America’s problem? (We
might as well blame bowling, Moore says. The Columbine student gunboys rolled a
few frames before shooting up their school.)

Again
and again, Moore wrecks his message with grandstanding. He confronts Kmart
managers with Columbine students seeking to return store merchandise, the
bullets lodged in their bodies. He wins a store promise to phase out ammunition
sales. Liberals cheer. So what? Wal-Marts in peaceable Canada sell bullets by
the ton, as Moore himself demonstrated.

Later, Moore interrogates National
Rifle Association president Charlton Heston over gun proliferation.
Enthusiastic audience hosannas, but to what purpose? Moore admits Canadians
also own lots of guns but don’t perpetrate our level of slaughter. And if he
wanted answers, the NRA’s legislative director would be the one to grill.

Moore
includes a lengthy roster of America’s use of military violence. What is his
point? He admits gun-free European nations have similarly bloody records. Is
“Bowling” an incisive documentary, or just crowd-pleasers staged for liberals?

Moore’s
disingenuous confusion hijacks “Bowling” completely when he highlights the
murder of the white 6 year-old Michigan girl by a first-grade black boy (see
above). Moore assigns blame to the poverty of the shooter’s mother caused by
(a) auto industry plant shutdowns that created chronic unemployment, and (b)
Michigan’s harsh welfare-to-work mandate that forced the mother to work long
hours at low-paying jobs, resulting in time away from mothering and eviction
from their home. But Moore earlier dismissed unemployment and poverty as
factors causing American gun violence--a standard leftist subterfuge that
completely undermines his best point.

However,
“Bowling” does reveal two uniquely American traits that may explain our gun
carnage: Americans fear each other intensely and are indifferent to our fellow
citizens’ well being. Those directly affected by a gun tragedy are the only
ones who care about it. Others are detached, motivated by political
opportunism, media ratings, and commercial interest. Moore’s otherwise
pointless interview with Heston accuses him mainly of insensitivity: the NRA
staged rallies in Colorado and Michigan following local gun tragedies. Was bad
manners really the sin?

Perhaps
so. American’s callousness to fellow citizens’ suffering, revealed countless
times in and by “Bowling,” is a key point. Canadians seem concerned about the
welfare of other Canadians and willing to translate that empathy into generous
social programs and trusting attitudes that don’t hold their fellow citizens in
poverty and suspicion. Americans fear and suspect other Americans. We reject
common responsibility out of the assumption that our own countrymen would
freeload. We buy guns for protection from each other and wind up shooting the
people around us in vastly outsized numbers.

But
why are Americans, inhabitants of the same country with shared interests, so
extraordinarily indifferent and fearful toward one another? This callousness is
shown in Michigan’s welfare system, NRA rallying at tragedy sites, the phony
press and politician exploitation of firearms murders, and the Flint District
Attorney’s indifference to inner city gun violence. Bowling demonstrates the extent to which Americans obsess over
trivial symbols and rigid ideologies to evade fundamental issues of
state-generated inequality and the violence it engenders—and for getting such a
message across in today’s hyper-patriotic climate, Moore has pulled off quite
an achievement.

Report
from the Gundown State

In
November 1999, I prepared a report for the California Attorney General’s
Juvenile Gun Violence Prevention Advisory Committee on the trends, levels, and
factors in “youth gun violence.” Contrary to expectations, I found that even in
a state with an enormous gun toll (43,000 killed from 1990 through 1999), the
vast majority of adolescents are not in substantial danger of death by
firearms, nor are they in more danger than adolescents of past decades.
California’s “kids and guns” problem is highly concentrated and appears to
result from “non-youth” forces, not from teenage behaviors. A brief summary of
this report follows.

Table 10b.
Regardless of race, where kids are poorer, they have

murder and gun death
rates much higher than do richer kids

White (non-Latino) youths: average annual murder and
gun-death rates

per 100,000 white youths ages 10-17 by county, California's
largest

counties, 1985-99

AverageHomicide Gun Gun

Rates of:Poverty Death death
murder

5
richest counties* 4.1% 1.4 2.9
0.8

7
poorest counties* 13.2% 3.0 6.6
2.1

Poor vs.
rich 3.2x 2.1x 2.3x 2.7x

Youth of color: average annual murder and gun-death rates
per 100,000

Latino, black, Asian, and Native youths ages 10-17 by
county,

California's largest counties, 1985-99

AverageHomicide Gun Gun

Rates of:Poverty Death death
murder

5
richest counties* 15.3% 4.9 5.0
4.0

7
poorest counties* 35.2% 9.2 10.3
7.5

Poor vs.
rich 2.0x 1.9x 2.0x
1.9x

*For California's 15 most populous counties, the five
richest counties are all those having white-youth poverty rates below 5% and
ranging from 2.5% to 4.3%; the seven poorest are all those having white-youth
poverty rates exceeding 10% and ranging from 11.5% to 18.1%. The same five
richest counties have nonwhite-youth poverty rates below 15% and range from
8.0% to 14.1%; the seven poorest have nonwhite-youth poverty rates exceeding
30% and range from 31.9% to 39.6%.

Race, gender,
location . Nearly all of California’s teenage-caused gun fatality, and gun
fatality increase, occurred from a temporary surge in homicide among Latino,
black, and Asian males in large urban counties with high youth poverty rates.
In fact, fewer than 100 of the state’s thousands of zip codes account for more
than half of all teenage firearms deaths. Further, most homicide deaths among
teenagers appear inflicted by adults, not by other teenagers.

In recent
decades, teenage gun fatalities have remained low and have declined or remained
constant among the following population groups: younger teens ages 10-14,
female teens, white (non-Latino) teens, teens in wealthier counties such as
Ventura and San Mateo, and deaths by accident, suicide, and undetermined
intent. For these groups, gun death rates are minimal and, where homicide is
the primary cause,tend to be shot by
persons outside their group. From 1985 to 2000, gun death rates among white
teens declined by 48% for boys and by 72% for girls.

As
poverty rates increase nine–fold from the richest white youths to the poorest
youths of color, murder rates jump 700%, gun death rates triple, and gun
homicides leap nine-fold. Middle-income white and nonwhite youth are in between
(Table 10b). While the public and policy makers are understandably horrified by
school shootings, it appears that in California (and, most likely, the nation
as a whole), both murder arrest and firearms mortality rates among white
(non-Latino) teenagers plummeted to their lowest levels in two to three decades
in 1997, and fell further through 2001.

Further,
in the last 10 to 15 years, gun suicide rates have converged among California
teens (white-youth rates have declined and black-youth rates are stable, while
rates for Latino and Asian youths have risen). However, homicide rates have
diverged (declining for white youths, rising and then falling for Latino,
black, and Asian youth). Further, research indicates teen firearms suicide
rates in past decades are artificially low due to misclassification as “accidents;”
a sharp “decline in accidents” coincided with the “increase in suicides.” These
trends toward greater safety among white teenagers are reflected in the latest
(1995-99) figures (Table 11). Latino, black, Asian, and Native 15-19-year-olds
have gun death rates considerably higher than adults of their respective
groups, but white 15-19-year-olds display the lowest rate of gun mortality of
any white age group except younger teens and children—lower than black
50-agers.

The
most salient cause of what we call “youth gun violence” is “adult gun
violence,” and its antecedent in poverty. In California’s 16 most populous
counties (populations exceeding 500,000) during the 1990s, rates of teenage gun
fatality vary by 650% (from 3 per 100,000 youths in Ventura County to 22 in
neighboring Los Angeles). Variations within races are equally dramatic. For
example, white teens in San Bernardino are four times more likely to die by
guns than white teens in Ventura, and Asian youths in Sacramento are seven
times more at risk than Asian youths in Santa Clara (San Jose). The wide
variations in teenage gun death rates closely track variations in rates of
adult gun death. In turn, rates of child, youth, and adult gun casualty are
closely related to poverty, which is not surprising since poverty is a strong
predictor of homicide. The correlation between teenage gun fatality and youth
poverty rates for California’s major counties in 1995-99 is 0.75; for all
childhood gun deaths and injuries and youth poverty rates, even higher (0.82).
Taken together, adult gun death rates and youth poverty rates explain more than

Implications.
The complex patterns of gun death in California suggest caution about popular
solutions. Major efforts to “get guns out of the hands of kids” are problematic
in a state where some 30 million guns are privately owned, as well as
inefficient given that the large majority of youth who have access to guns are
not at risk from them. Efforts to reduce or prevent gun acquisition by persons
of all ages who are unsuited to have them (surveys showing widespread, careless
gun storage and handling by adults suggest that most people are unsuited) through laws and strict training
requirements are also beneficial. An age-integrated “California firearms
violence and prevention campaign” would be preferable to one which focuses only
on “juveniles.” Other than in the artificial world of political convenience,
there seems to be no material difference between youths and the adults around
them when it comes to firearms tragedy.